So close, and yet so far

Now, seemingly as part of that effort, there’s now (finally) an Amazon Prime Video app available for Android TV.

But there’s a catch, as Android Police discovered. You can’t actually use the service at the moment with many Android TV-compatible devices, as Amazon hasn’t updated the compatibility list.

If you try to install it, in other words, you’ll likely just see a long list of devices it’s not compatible with. So far no one’s found a device it actually works with.

In fact, the problem even extends to devices like the Nvidia Shield TV, which actually already includes the Amazon Prime app in its firmware (and so was a way of working around the Prime Video app’s long absence from the Play Store for Android TV devices).

Whatever. Hopefully it’s a minor technical thing that could be fixed in a couple of hours. At least it’s a step in the right direction that will ultimately benefit us on the user side of things.

A little of this, a little of that

At this point, the most interesting aspect of this conflict is seeing how far Google feels like Amazon has to go before all wrongs are made right.

Amazon already announced that it would start selling the Chromecast again (although it has yet to actually appear on the site) and the addition of Prime Video to Android TV is a significant improvement (although it’s still not available on the Chromecast).

It’s also worth wondering how long this good-natured holiday cheer will last, as just yesterday Amazon was caught filing trademarks for what looks like a YouTube competitor called “Amazontube.” Hopefully that’s all behind us now.